“Tatiana! What the hell?” he asked. She pressed a button and Harding’s monitor was suddenly showing the desktop of her workstation.
“Look at this video. It is a synthesized time-lapse recording of the last forty-four transmissions from CPNS-4. What do you see? What do you see?” she exclaimed.
Harding was puzzled by the urgency in her voice.
He knew that Copernicus-4 was currently in an orbit that was 73 degrees offset from the ecliptic, traveling at 183,000 miles per hour. It had been out there for six years, seven months, fourteen days, and about five hours. He knew this because he had the innate ability to calculate rapidly from internal ‘books’ that he memorized and was able to recall almost instantly. One of these ‘books’ was a listing of every SPARTACUS related launch, and the time and date of the launch. He watched the video. It appeared to him as though he was watching a slow-motion presentation of a KR2ZYYB valve experiencing “Milky Way Algorithmic Diaphragm Failure Mode”. He had seen enough of these to know what it was.
Suddenly, he noticed the timestamps on the video. This recording was playing back events that had occurred over a four-year interval. At the speed of playback, they were compressed into a ten-second clip. Over six hundred observations were being shown, and the effect was disturbing.
The clip showed a giant wave of ‘something’ that was getting larger as it traveled toward the satellite. It looked very much like a Milky Way Failure, he thought. But the scale was drastically off. “When did you get this?” he asked. “Sixteen days ago” came the reply.
“Have you extrapolated…” he started to say, but she cut him off. “David, this is heading directly for Earth. CPNS-4 has stopped transmitting. We have calculated that it will impact us in twelve days,” she said.
“There is no doubt. The calculations are correct and have been validated. Woomera and Jodrell Bank have been scanning and there are no indications that this is even out there. The only reason CPNS-4 seems to have discerned it is because of the experimental neutrino detectors that were outfitted. The latest detectors use argon instead of the radon gas used for cushioning the lenses in CPNS-4.
We suspect that the naturally occurring radioactive decay isotopes formed since launch have somehow modified the mylar and nylon lenses and coupled with the amount of time the system has spent in vacuum, have created a spectral shift in the FFT analyzer coupled to the tertiary CCD device. The only parameters we have been able to calculate are speed, trajectory, and apparent volume.”
“What is it?” he said. “We have no idea at this time” she replied. “How big?” he asked. “It’s 40,000 AU across.” “Planform?” “Wave.” “Topography?” “Uniform planar, much like a tsunami before cresting,” she said.
“Does Washington know? ”They are being notified of the revised status of the impact. They were told of this 16 days ago, but we were instructed to review and dig for more information. The video was rendered about three hours ago. I only just finished my review and cross-indexing with FIDO and PLUTO mainframes. The ARCTURUS database allowed me to calculate potential paths, using the hurricane NOAA algorithms, which as you know are accurate for this purpose. “He grunted again. It was an interesting but little-appreciated fact that the NOAA databases had an uncanny ability to predict incoming space objects when historical hurricane path algorithms were used as the input parameters. He wondered which hurricane had lent its math to this thing.
“What can we do about this?” he said, already knowing the answer.
“Nothing. We can do nothing to avoid the collision.”
On his monitor, Dr. Tatiana Golovonov looked very unhappy indeed.
“One doesn't recognize the really important moments in one's life until it's too late.”
- Agatha Christie
“A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.”
- Joseph Stalin
Chapter Two
BUCKSPORT, MAINE
He looked at the moving green and amber lights on his monitor. The room was antiseptic but smelled vaguely of urine because of the tubes and bags and occasional spills that had occurred over the last few weeks. His breathing was labored, as the cancer had taken most of his left lung, and a goodly portion of his right. His eyes focused poorly, and as he quietly watched them, the traces left on the monitor screens looked like snaking watercolor lines that measured his life leaving his body. The tube down his throat, creeping into his esophagus through a tracheal valve, annoyed him immensely. Mostly, it was the irritating knowledge of its presence, but when he coughed, it sometimes became dislodged. At that point, either his daughter ( or a nurse or one of his nieces - whoever was unlucky enough to pull duty at that time) would smear a vile lubricant on it and push it back into place. Sometimes, it made him gag, and he would cough it right back out.
He was pretty sure the cancer was from his earlier habit of smoking so many cigarettes, but he also wondered how much of it came from exposure to the odd chemical mixtures from the battlefields he had conquered as a much younger man. He could remember the smells – acrid smoke from the shells, the cordite odor of the small arms and grenades, the way that the enemy soldiers stunk of fried bacon and excrement.
As a commander, he had ordered the attacking forces use all manner of weapon to destroy the targets he was handed by his superiors. Rising rapidly in the Army, he never questioned the morality or justice of his actions. Mainly, it was the precision and rapidity of executing these orders that brought notice. Many lesser officers succumbed to other career pressures, or could not deliver the needed results. Many lesser officers had died. Some he had personally killed. It was the cost of war, and he rarely regretted his actions.
But now, lying on a mattress that reeked of the piss and shit from his dying body, he glanced out the windows of his large mansion overlooking Penobscot Bay.
He could see the lights of boats puttering back and forth on unknown errands.
He had decided to move to Bucksport, Maine on the strength of it being remote and somewhat reclusive. The house he had purchased from the heirs of an old local family, who had decided they wanted a more exciting lifestyle.
He thought them foolish because the tradition and property value of the land far outweighed any perceived benefits to be found in any modern city.
He was known as “The General” by both his acquaintances, and his enemies. He had no friends, and his enemy list had also been pared down by both time and his own ruthless nature. He had entered the hospice program mostly to be able to die in his own home and to prevent the possibility of an agent taking a final, although ultimately pointless, revenge upon him.
He had married twice, and both of his wives bore him sons. The second wife also gave him a daughter. He had outlived his wives and buried them with their respective kin.
At 88 years old, he had a fair run, he mused.
He’d had his share of adventures, women, killing, whoring, affairs, and warfare. His schedule of deployments left no room for real love, just frenetic couplings when he came back from the War, whenever or wherever that was to be found. He had provided a comfortable living for his wives. They never wanted, although he had done far better the second time around, somehow managing to marry laterally. It was something he would always manage to bring to his ex-wife’s attention, this sudden luck in the marriage lottery. She was a fairly gracious woman when they would encounter each other during visitation with his sons, but he knew she secretly resented him. It gave him pleasure to realize she had never remarried. He thought she never got over him, and that made him smirk underneath the oxygen mask.
Still, he was bitter about his career, having followed all the rules except one. For violation of that one small rule, he was automatically stalled in his path. Nothing could ever change it, and he knew he could never be anything more in the Army. He had resigned, not in disgrace, but fairly close to it. He hated the taste of his resignation more than anything else for many years, managing to turn it into anger and outrage at the m
en who had found out about his transgression. They eventually forgot about it, as such little men do, and then he struck back and had his cold revenge. He remembered the look of comprehension that had dawned on one of these traitorous bastards as he throttled the life from him. It made him smirk once more.
His four sons were all dead.
The General was not able to get the boys to follow in his military footsteps, as he had followed in his father’s. An unfortunate combination of a life of ease, their tendency towards decadence and his indifference to them doomed them from the start. One son, Michael, had died from an overdose at only thirty years of age. Eddie was the victim of a heart attack while mowing the lawn one hot summer day. Peter was killed by a drunken, teenage girl, who had also perished from the crash. Peter’s entire family died with him, in a fiery coffin.
There was not enough left of any of them for a decent burial.
His oldest son committed suicide. Mark had been running an apparently successful business when his wife had caught him in the arms of another man. The shame and embarrassment were not the reasons he had listed in his suicide note. It was his realization that the other man would never leave his wife for him.
Mark had shot himself in the mouth with his sporting clays shotgun, at the breakfast table, as his wife tried in vain to prevent it. She had ended up in an asylum.
With his daughter, at least, he had thought he might have done things correctly. She washed him, now, taking her turn in caring for him with stoic detachment. He felt that perhaps he had wasted a vast swath of his life in pouring what little attention he could give his family onto them. His true calling had always been war, and its machines.
The General was racked with a coughing fit that lasted a few long, agonizing minutes. His lungs felt as though they had declared war on his ribcage, and were flensing his flesh from the inside out. The morphine drip stuck into a little plastic port just below his wrist provided no relief he could discern. More than once, he had tried to get to the hanging IV pouch and give it a good squeeze, but he no longer had the strength to move hardly at all.
The General felt himself void another meager trickle of urine into the bag at the side of the bed. The sensation was unmanning, and he gritted his teeth in anger at the humiliation he felt.
Once, a very long time ago, he had pissed on the corpses of vanquished soldiers across the battle zones of the world. He thought it the final insult. Other than spattering the blood of pigs on the Muslim men he captured, tortured and then killed, he could think of no other act that illustrated his complete contempt and disdain of these cretins who had believed that they could best him.
Lost in the reveries of his hatred, he fell into an uneasy sleep.
*****
SOMALIA, AFRICA –
While The General coughed himself into fitful slumber, another man on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, and just above the Equator was fighting for his life.
The man had come to Somalia as part of a United Nations Peacekeeping Expedition. The terrible plight of the children in the area, torn by warfare, haunted by disease and famine distressed the man sorely. He had cried himself to sleep, embarrassed by his humanity, too many times to count. Every time another baby slipped from him, he cried.
When he saw the atrocities meted out to young girls, and how their innocence was stolen from them by the selfish men who styled themselves warriors, he cried.
Once, while attending to a boy who was dying of starvation, he contemplated smothering him to end his suffering. He was spared this horror by the timely and unexpected arrival of the boy’s mother. She grabbed the child from his arms and ran out of the building. He never saw the boy again, but he did see the mother and her daughter many times in the next few weeks. Then, several months after the incident with the boy, he found the mother dead in a pool of water. The little girl had also disappeared by then. He cried some more.
A noted virologist, Dr. Richard Anderson had been born in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States of America. At that time, it was still fashionable to keep the white and black populations segregated. He grew up being hated for the color of his skin. He saw his parents - intellectual, soft-spoken and kind – being spat upon by men whose greatest attributes were their prowess in catching hogs with high-powered rifles. As he matured, he tried to understand the separation and the hatred. He could not.
His mind was exceptional, and his parents nurtured his thirst for knowledge.
In the early sixties, he decided as a teenager to become a spokesperson for Civil Rights. He wrote impassioned letters to the Atlanta Journal and Constitution, to The Economist, and to the New York Times. His arguments were solid, his understanding of the problem complete. Often, he would get rejections or no response at all. Sometimes, however, he succeeded in chipping away one tiny, flinty piece of racism. He took pleasure when this happened.
His activities brought him to the notice of other famous men of the time: Malcolm X, Dr. King, and even Senator Robert Kennedy of Massachusetts. People began seeking him out, and he was a lightning rod for action.
Continuing to excel in his studies, he was approached by the Senator from Massachusetts and offered a complete scholarship to Harvard Medical School. He could not have been more shocked and surprised. Two days later, Robert Kennedy was dead from an assassin’s bullets.
Richard attended the funeral, and afterwards, Robert’s brother Ted had assured him that the offer from Harvard still stood and that he could honor the memory of his brother by succeeding at all costs in this endeavor. Richard thanked Teddy and entered Harvard.
He excelled yet again, graduating at the top of his class, and did his residency at Johns Hopkins. He specialized in virology, toxicology, and the immunization processes that were needed to create the vaccines to treat malaria, cholera, and rickets. His work brought him attention, and he assisted teams at Ft. Detrick and the Centers for Disease Control in bringing about the eradication of smallpox.
Afterward, the CDC hired him on permanently as a research biologist and Director of Virology to lead efforts to identify two unusual diseases that had their roots in Africa.
One, which had never before been seen in humans, became his primary area of research. Dr. Anderson studied and isolated the causes and effects of the human immunodeficiency virus. He cataloged and indexed the various medicines, treatments and results.
Finally, in the late 1980’s, he had managed to provide pharmaceutical companies and the Food and Drug Administration with a formal mechanism by which to begin treating AIDs.
*****
The Doctor eventually managed to find the time to travel and found himself in Kenya. He was stunned by its beauty, and awed by the friendliness of the people who welcomed him into their homes. Never could he have imagined such a paradise of fellow humans. He returned to the United States, but legally changed his name to Amadu Mfala. He could give no other reason for this other than a desire he had come to embrace while on his travels. For the next several years, he availed himself of every opportunity to go to various African countries. He met his wife, Kamala and they married wearing traditional ceremonial garb. The Shaman blessed them, and they spent their wedding night running naked across the veldt, chasing after wildebeest and zebra. They made love under the Moon, and he had never been happier in his life.
Late in the year, they conceived the first of many children. Amadu’s life progressed, and he became involved with the United Nations by providing consulting services to the scientists tasked with eradicating the malaria virus. Deciding he could be more effective by being closer to the problem, he and his family relocated to Gisenyi, Rwanda in March of 1994.
Four months later, his entire family had been killed.
Dr. Mfala found himself staring down the bore of a Chinese reproduction of the infamous AK-47 assault rifle. He knew that this particular model was favored by the pirates and warlords now controlling Somalia. He knew that the .30 caliber round was capable of completely drilling through any part of his
body. He knew that the bullet could eviscerate or amputate his appendages.
He had treated countless victims of this terrible weapon. When Mikhail Kalashnikov, the inventor of this fiendish device had finally died at 94 years of age, he shamed himself by thinking he would love to travel to the man’s grave and spit on it. He almost cried at the thought of all the people whose lives were ended by this mechanical death tool, but he was too intent on trying to stay alive to really analyze his true feelings.
The young bully in front of him, stuffing the muzzle of the gun into his face, was only about thirteen. His compatriots were of similar ages, maybe as young as nine years old. The oldest child there was sixteen, but evidently hired only as muscle.
No, the actual threat was “Captain”. The boy had styled himself as some kind of military leader, although in reality he was more of a gang-member.
Mfala knew that Captain wanted something from him, but the concussion he knew he had gotten from being smacked in the skull with an assault rifle made it difficult to concentrate. He took stock of his condition. Blood poured from his lacerated scalp and was drenching his white shirt. This was not really a big deal, he told himself, medically speaking, as head wounds always bled a lot. Although, he thought, that was a pretty impressive amount of blood.
“Listen to me!” shouted Captain. “You leave now, or you die! Now! You leave now or die now!”
Amadu thought he just might be able to make some kind of headway with the boy when he got the surprise of his long life.
*****
NEAR THE 6950TH GUARDS AIR BASE (FORMERLY 22ND GUARDS HEAVY-BOMBER DIVISION) IN ENGELS (SARATOV OBLAST)
Major Anton Golovanov frowned at his co-pilot.
The Tu-160 (Blackjack) strategic bomber he was piloting had been developed at the A. N. Tupolev Design Bureau and produced at the Russian aviation plant in Kazan. It carried ten Kh-55 cruise missiles in the bomb bay. The Kh-55 long-range air-launched cruise missiles had been developed at the Raduga Design Bureau. Production of the missiles began in 1983 at the Dubna Machine-Building Plant. Recently, Russia had tasked its scientists to develop a new long-range cruise missile, which could be launched by the Tu-160. The rotary launcher in the bomb bay of Golovanov’s Blackjack held two prototypes of this missile.
Terminal Reset Omnibus: The Coming of The Wave Page 2